“
Designs on the Contemporary is the narration of a quest, and the quest is double. In one part, it seeks to formulate the means by which and the criteria according to which the anthropologist can legitimately claim to be a diagnostician of our contemporary forms of life—forms marked, among other things, by their irreducible indeterminacy. In another part, it seeks to identify just those forms of contemporary life for whose adequate diagnosis anthropological fieldwork is a necessary point of departure. The latter aim proves constantly to impose itself on the former, and the former aim constantly to have to be reformulated in the face not merely of the recalcitrance but also the inspiration that its encounters yield. There’s an epistemological, ontological, and ethical moral to this story: that collaborative inquiry is essential to coming anthropologically to terms with who we aren’t any longer, who we are, and who we might be. Were anthropologists to take this seriously, anthropology would be a very different discipline than the discipline it is today—all the calls for collaboration notwithstanding. Let’s hope they take it seriously.”
— James D. Faubion, Rice University